Tracing the Shocking Chic of Spock’s Legendary Star Trek Haircut

Fans who put Star Trek Beyond in the number-one spot at the box office this weekend went boldly where no man has gone before—but they may also have acquired a yen to take their beauty look to soaring new heights. For all of the inexplicably alluring oddities featured in the cult classic series—Worf’s mountain range of a furrowed brow, Data’s robotic ice-white eyes—we can’t seem to look away from the cooly crisp half-Vulcan, half-human known as Spock. There are the acute alien ears yin-yanged to the equally sharp side burns, the severe obsidian bowl cut, and the extreme linear eyebrows—which emphasize his commitment to unemotional rationality. As absurd as the look is, it continues to live long and prosper due to some rather chic roots.

First airing in 1966, Star Trek was launched just one year after Vidal Sassoon sent shockwaves through the hair world with the five-point cut, the famously graphic trim given to Grace Coddington that rewrote the rules for the way hair frames a face. It’s not hard to image why those crisply undulating lines, razor-sharp angles, and severe helmutlike bangs may have appealed to the show’s creators when dreaming up a look for Spock—they certainly seemed to be of another time, if not another galaxy.

Given its nod on television, Spock’s raven fringe was raised to reveal another dramatic aesthetic statement: a set of Marlene Dietrich–esque eyebrows that Leonard Nimoy shaved off for the series (he would later admit that they never regrew to their full capacity). In the ’30s, Dietrich adopted what Cecil Beaton reportedly referred to as “limned butterflies’ antennae on her forehead,” to further her enigmatic star power appeal; filled out to a fatter width more akin to, say, Audrey Hepburn’s caterpillar set for the original series, they gave Spock a similarly otherworldly look. Five decades later, now seen on Zachary Quinto’s modern-day incarnation of the beloved character in Star Trek Beyond, the Spock effect still marries the elegance of restraint with the shock-inducing power of severe angles. In other words, it sets phasers to stun.